Using Skitch in Your Classroom

As you know, I've been slowly moving toward a paperless teaching world.  The recent purchase of an iPad, as well as the constant availability of an Elmo and projector, have rapidly changed the way we do business in our classroom.  I've been learning how to use a variety of applications for planning, teaching, collecting anecdotal notes, and capturing student learning.

One application I have found quite useful is now part of the Evernote family.  (For more on how I use Evernote see my Choice Literacy Article:  Capturing Student Learning with Evernote.)  If you haven't downloaded Skitch for your iPad, you should.  Skitch is available for most devices.  I have it on my Android phone, iPad and Mac.  Interestingly, it does not yet seem to be available for the iPhone.  Skitch allows you to take a photograph or screenshot and write directly on it to make your point quickly.  You can also use it more like a whiteboard as a drawing tool.

Learning to Use Skitch
Anytime I download an app - I do just what my students do - I start to play with it.  How could I use this application in my daily life?  Here's what I tried:

After taking a screenshot of one of our flowerbeds, I labeled the perennials planted for future reference.

After planing our garden I labeled the types of plants and their location.  This ended up being helpful since the rabbits decided to eat the eggplant and banana pepper plants.  It was easy to remember what to replant.

This is an idea I had for using Skitch with students in informational writing.  Students would choose a topic and tell one thing they had learned.  Then dig deeper into the information until they were layers beyond where they started.

In the Classroom
Then I started using it at school.  I have found it can be used for a variety of learning experiences.  It enhances discussions with students by helping to make learning more visible.  Here are a few ways I find Skitch to be useful:

Discuss student work:  Here is a picture taken during math workshop.  This student had discovered a way to count objects more efficiently by grouping them.  After taking a photograph and pulling it into Skitch, I was able to circle the sets as we counted together.  (Taking photos during math workshop has helped us to save time during the share at the end of our math workshop.  No longer do students need to drag tools to our circle to show friends their thinking.)






As a white board:  Here Skitch was used to rainbow write a word during a word study lesson.

To show places on a map:  Skitch has a world map that you can crop to show regions.  During Poetry Tag, a global poetry event started by Deb Frazier's class in April, a class from Guatemala left a poem.  We were able to locate Guatemala on the map during our discussion to see where it was located in relation to where we were.  Quick and easy.

To record student thinking:  In an accidental misplacement of myself during teaching, I found myself at my iPad when a discussion about what we had learned so far about clocks began.  I decided to use Skitch to record the conversation written in green.  Then in pink we discussed the challenges we still faced learning to tell time.  The change from a chart really captured student attention.  I could have easily printed this for reference.  In this case, I then walked around the room as students worked and recorded confusions I was noting.  Students did not see this part of the document.

To demonstrate use of a webpage:  Skitch allows you to capture a screenshot and write directly on it.  Here is an example of capturing a Kidblog page to demonstrate creating a post for our class blog.  The labels really help students to see the important parts of the print on the page.  I'm thinking this would be useful in teaching students to understand the set-up of web pages when looking for information and researching topics using the internet.

All of these examples are ways I'm using Skitch to have conversations about learning with students.  Students could do many of these things in their learning to demonstrate understanding if iPads or Macs are available for use.  I'm hoping you'll share your ideas for Skitch below.  

Here are a few links you might find helpful:

• An Introduction to Skitch:  In a video Steve Dotto discusses basic tool use within Skitch.
• Skitch as a Teaching Tool:  Stefanie Fozzio shares the way one teacher uses Skitch in his foreign language class.